The polonium gives off alpha particles that help to discharge static from the negatives as you brush them. $10-$20.
Polonium was also used on spark plugs for a while during the "atomic age". Neat idea, ionizing radiation lets you set the electrodes further apart. Found a picture of them here.
Sounds plausible, but I'm not sure how well they'd work, nor am I sure how much polonium would end up reacting chemically during combustion and leaving the tailpipe as a dangerous radioactive compound, but I've seen them before and thought they were amusing.
Better watch out or every homey with a V-Tec sticker on his Honda Civic will be trying to screw 1940s spark plugs into his head so he can have a "nuclear-powered" 4-cylinder wanna-be racecar.
I found a basket full of buggers out of a few old TV sets on a friend's property last week. They tend to weather the elements pretty well.
Sadly, TV tubes don't tend to be very valuable. With the number of 6GH8As that I have, one would think that I should be a millionaire, but most people don't need a bandpass amplifier for a 1960s color TV.
I've grabbed a few tubes out of the backs of radios, TVs and industrial equipment I've found mostly in (primarily) automotive junkyards. Usually the type number is washed off the glass, making the tube nearly useless. If you can tell a triode from a pentode by looking through the glass, you can make guesses and then careful analysis on the tube tester, but that assumes the tube was good to begin with.
Only TV tube I've ever got like that which was useful and rare enough to warrant the effort was a 6BK4. Fortunately, those are pretty easy to spot through the glass, it looks like a death ray in there. (High voltage triode, designed as a shunt regulator in early (late 1950s) color TV sets.)
Has this been done before? Any comments on ruggedization?
Yes. Plenty.
The car radio was not invented with the transistor. Motorola, who was originally founded to make "Motor Victrolas", ie. car audio, branched into semiconductors almost as soon as it was seen that they had practical aspects in car radios.
In the beginning, car radios had tubes. Tubes require filament power as well as the power and B+ power. The parallel would be a transistor radio which needs a 9V battery (main power) to power the radio and a whole bunch of 1.5V D cells (filament power) to keep the transistors warm enough to work.
The filaments of appropriate tubes will run happily off 12V, but they still need something from about 90V to 250V for main power (known as B+ or plate supply). Back then, cars ran off 6V or 12V electrical systems, and this had to provide sufficient voltage for the radio. Before transistors and switching power supplies, there was only one way: the vibrator.
Sexual references aside, a vibrator is basically a relay wired to break its circuit when it's turned on. The raspy buzz chopped a circuit on and off, which made DC from the car's electrical system into a pulsetrain which drove a small transformer. The transformer stepped up the voltage and it was rectified in the usual way for the era: a small recifier tube. Of course, this was highly inefficient and noisy.
Never mind that the car radio would take several amps while it was on, and these were in the days before alternators. Less efficient generators and battery technology meant that leaving the radio on for too long while in traffic would run down the battery to the point where the ignition system stopped - and so did you.
Durability was another issue. Tubes are held in their sockets by friction, and would have a tendency to vibrate out of their sockets, making the radio fail. The "loctal" base was invented to deal with this. It was a base design where the tube's keyway was notched and would hold the tube with a spring on the base. They're a pain in the ass since they always corrode in the locked position and you often break the tube trying to get it out of the socket.
Tubes are basically light bulbs with a whole bunch of closely-spaced wires, grids and sheetmetal electrodes. If they move relative to each other, the electrical characteristics of the tube change - and therefore so does the behavior of the radio. This effect is called "microphonics". Not to mention vibration fatigue causing shorts, cracked glass and vacuum loss, etc. Tubes don't like vibrations. If don't believe me, hit your monitor a few times.
While I love tubes, a car stereo is about the last place they belong.
On this site you can see what a 1930s car radio looked like. Note that the radio was too large to fit in the dashboard and often ended up in the passenger's footwell. A "control head" was a set of remote volume and tuning knobs on the dashboard; they were usually connected by a cable arrangement similar to speedometer or bicycle brake cables.
Background? I collect and restore antique TV sets and 1960s/1970s musclecars. Lots of my friends are into 1930s and 1940s cars, and often get me to fix their vintage tube car radios so that the full experience of driving a car of that era can be preserved.
Sterephile reports about the Panasonic CQ-TX5500D(link to Japanese site) car stereo that uses a vaccuum tube, with analog vu-meters. It also plays mp3 files 8-) Naturally, this is for the Japan market only."
Even with a modern DC-DC converter powering the B+ circuit, what a profoundly stupid idea.
Tubes don't like vibrations. Putting tubes into cars is like putting a hard disk drive into a hardware store paint mixer. If they were really concerned about sound quality, they wouldn't put tubes there.
Lightbulbs always burn out when you turn them on or off. So do tube filaments. Count how many times you started your car today. The tube won't last long.
It's for use in a *car*. I love cars. And I love audio. But a car is a resonant steel can. You cannot change its nature and have it remain a car. Therefore, good sound in a car is not possible. You can have good sound, or a good car, but not good sound *in* a car. I will, however, concede that there is such thing as good sound *for* a car, ie. given the limitations of the venue. But the limiting factor there remains the venue - the car, not the fact that your preamplifier doesn't use Mullard 12AX7s. That's kinda like putting a 3" exhaust tip on your Honda Civic's 1" diameter engine-to-tailpipe exhaust system and somehow thinking that you've reduced the restriction.
While I really like the fact that it plays MP3s, this is just more stuff for homiez with gold chains, small cars, and smaller penises.
Can't wait until "Da Bass" people get their hands on this. A car stereo which can bounce quarters on the roof of the car will be more than sufficient to make the tube microphonic. Feedback between the subs and the tube will result in blown subs, toasted amplifiers, and no more din of license plates rattling on every rusting 1984 Prelude at every traffic light.
it's about as close to a geek house of horrors you can get...
No, this line is:
Power triode. Similar in size to power tubes used on the early computers, but this particular tube type is brand-new. It can be compared with a power transistor of comparable power rating.
Funny thing, though - Monster Cable is pretty crappy cabling, but for guitar cables, the D'Addario PlanetWaves cables are actually exceptional. And they come in shiny blister packs (or rather, you CAN buy them in shiny blister backs, or in braids).
Feh. I'll stick with the stuff the pros use: light duty work (recording studios, etc.) is HPN heater cord. About 6 cents per foot at Home Depot.:)
Rigging arrayable speakers for use in stadiums (rock concerts), we'd run tin-plated copper stranded distribution cable (pole-to-house wire) for long runs and 8 or 10 AWG 2-conductor jacketed cable. The distro cable was used primarily for heavy metal concerts at smaller venues like the 50,000 seat SkyDome. [grin] Anything bigger and you'd fly the amps in the rigging, too.
For guitars, tube amps just sound better. Digital modelling, etc., all try to REPRODUCE the sound of a tube amps, not best it. That's fairly telling. The reasons tube amps sound better for guitars are varied, but are mostly centered around overdriving the amp. The distortion comes on very smoothly as you roll the volume up, and responds to dynamics much better.
A very big point with guitar amps is microphonics. Since the amplifier chassis tends to be built into the same cabinet as the speaker, all the tubes are vibrating with each note. This does all sorts of neat things to the sound, since the elements (plate, grid(s), cathode) are all vibrating with respect to each other. In REproduction, microphonic tubes are a very bad thing. But in a guitar amp, the amplifier is absolutely part of the instrument.
Some of the best audiophile home stereos I've heard have been tube (mid 70's Marantz gear), and some have been transistor (late 70's Marantz gear). But tube amps are just NOT cost effective anymore, and almost all of the supposed advantages are just audiophile snobbery.
Agreed. Most of today's tube fascination is unjustified.
A tube output amplifier is *not* a high fidelity device in this day and age - by using tubes, you're forcing yourself to deal with the nonlinearities in the behavior of the tubes and, more importantly, of the output transformer which impedance-matches the tube to the speaker. Building a transformer to be a "straight wire with impedance matching" at any sort of power from 20Hz to 20kHz is non trivial, from the core up. (Power transformers from 50/60Hz are big and heavy, full of laminated iron sheets. Transformers for 15kHz (TV flyback transformer) are ferrite-cored. Hugely different magnetic properties of the core, and both of those devices are *within* the audio range!) There is no logical or rational reason, in this day and age, to use a tube output stage in a non-guitar amplifier.
However, in small signal stages, things are different. Since tubes run at higher voltages than comparable solid state components, induced noise is less significant. If your audio signal is floating around on a DC offset of 140V and you're inducing 500mV of noise into it, that's a hell of a lot less obtrusive than the same 500mV of noise induced on a 12V offset. Never mind that the interstage amplitudes also tend to be higher. There are a couple of issues, here, though. Tubes are larger, meaning that they have larger areas of conductors to pick up noise than, let's say, a surface-mount MOSFET on a ground-plane PC board. And vibration is strictly verboten; we don't want to color the music.
And tubes amplifiers tend to have high input and output impedances, which makes them ideal for pre-amp stages.
Audiophiles like tubes for the wrong reasons. If tubes add "warmth" to your music, the amplifier is probably driving them too hard and you're attenuating the high end (ie. poor design). But if a tube amplifier is indistinguishable from a semiconductor amplifier except that there's less hiss, then the tubes are doing their jobs.
As I told an "audiophile" once, they don't use Monster Cables in the recording studio... Balanced line XLR. Good engineering is always better than cheap crap sold in shiny blister packs.:)
I wonder what is next? Power through my cable tv line?
Too late.
Several models of Sterivision hospital TV sets use that already. These are the easily-removed pay-to-watch-Jerry-Springer-from-your-deathbed TV sets that hospitals charge for.
Since they're installed only on demand, they have to be simple and easy to connect... one wire. They seem to run off 12VDC driven down the coax. Isolating the RF for the tuner is a simple matter of a couple of small capacitors.
Lots of TV antenna amplifiers also use a technique like this to avoid having to run power and coax wires up a (possibly tall) TV antenna tower. Radio Shack used to sell such a system.
Of course, the practical current is limited only by the resistance of the coax. (Resistance is *not* impedance, don't confuse 75 ohm impedance with the DC resistance of the cable.) If someone built superconductive coax, there'd be no DC resistance, and you could power your house and get RoadRunner cable Interet on the same wire...:)
remember the old amstrad 512 and 640 well if you were upgrading the 512 to 640kb ior ram you had to uinsert chips manually and they reccomemded putting it on the kitchen sink, grounded through the buildings earthing and touching metail before a chip or PCB.
Yeah. It was a new thing, all this new-fangled CMOS.:) The good old days, when motherboards were full of TTL logic (SN74xx), the Internet connection was a 300 baud acoustic-coupled modem, and UUCP e-mail was too complicated for spammers to have figured out.
wow, not only are you running your domain off a pentium 90, but you also have reverse DNS lookup turned on in the logs... that's gotta be giving you a decent preformance hit, no?
Well, it doesn't actually handle DNS; that's felix, an old 486DX-33 running FreeBSD, port-forwarded behind my gateway (I've only got the one IP address). But yeah, I'm sure each logger thread gets held up waiting for resolution.
More impressively, dynamic content. (Most of the pages are generated dynamically as shtml through the x-bit hack; nothing sophisticated, mostly just inserting templates and stuff for color scheme because I'm too lazy to type long BODY tags) And anywhere from 2,000 to 5,000 hits per day. And only 48 megs of RAM. And it's a popular Linux distro's default kernel, not recompiled for that machine. Even so, it hardly ever breaks a sweat.
As you can tell, it's like, zero performance tuning. But it still cranks out a SETI@Home unit every day or two.
As for reverse DNS itself, yeah, I like it.:) It's a nice luxury.
Are google claiming that they can check through the entire internet inside a timescale of 3 months, ready to check through again at the start of the next quarter?
I don't know if that's all that far-fetched. I know Googlebot last hit my site on April 7th, crawled every page in my domain over the course of 12 hours, and current searches of their cache show content I'd updated at that time. They seem to visit every month or so.
Perhaps it's based on the traffic they detect to a given site through their CGI redirects... but I'm not a large site, my primary webserver is a Pentium 90.:)
As far as the "to unplug or not to unplug" debate, there is probably a credible argument that even though you don't have a good ground when the case if off and unplugged, things like static electricity will dissipate whenever you touch a large metal object like the chassis, due to leakage effects.
Get a grounded (three-prong) plug, high-value resistors, some 24AWG wire and an alligator clip. Stick ~10 megs between the ground pin on the plug and the wire. Crimp the alligator clip onto the end. Plug it into a wall socket, and clip the lead onto the chassis.
Or, you can consider that the monitor and the computer are grounded to each other by the shell of the VGA connector, which is connected to the backsplash, cabinet and motherboard ground plane. If the monitor is plugged in, and the computer is plugged into the monitor, then you can unplug a (risky) ATX supply and at least have some measure of grounding.
I'm going to chicken out and post this anonymously. I was a Navy component level electronics techy guy, then I worked for Nortel doing pretty much the same thing, then i opened my own computer store and built thousands of custom systems. I used "critical, sound ESD principles" only about 1% of that time.
Oh good.
Speaking as a taxpayer who is forced to fund Northern Telecom by Jean Poutine and The Party, I'm glad to know that they're hiring competent people.
it's a bunch of crap. just avoid touching the contacts,
ie. don't touch the non-conductive parts of a given board or assembly? This is static electricity, the excess or absence of electrons on a non-conductive surface that we're worried about. When errant static charges find equilibrium through a conductor (or a silicon dioxide gate layer in a MOSFET) is when a damaging current flows. If your conjecture were true, it wouldn't be possible to rub a balloon on your head and have it stick to a wall.
I used to work for Litton before we were bought up by Northrup Grumman and our divison was closed. I did component-level design on radar systems for a company that builds aircraft carriers and cruise missile guidance computers. Wanna tell me about static control?
don't use a metal workbench thats not grounded,
Grounded or not, don't use a metal workbench. What happens to the clock/CMOS battery on a motherboard if you place the board on a metal workbench?
put some anti-static material on your working area.
Conductive (>100,000 ohms/inch is usually okay) foam or rubber mat on the work surface. Grounded to the same place as your heel/wrist strap and the computer on which you're working. Essential. Equipment to do it won't cost you more than $40.
Oh yeah, and don't ground yourself directly. Stick a high value resistor between the subassembly that is you and the ground to which you wish to connect yourself. That way, if you come into contact with a live conductor somewhere, the resistor will limit the current and the unpleasantness.
don't concern yourself with the rest of that crap, unless you just want to, or if for some reason you have to work in a charged room.
30V to punch a gate junction. You can generate a hundred times that by wearing cotton and sitting on a polyester seatcushion.
But don't think you have to waste money on it, you don't.
Nope, an insanely cost-sensitive company like Dell, making 5% margins on $2,000 liabilities in a cut-throat industry, does it just because they like to subsidize 3M's silver plastic baggie division.
just don't handle the parts in a stupid fashion.
Like the one you're advocating.
You are dangerous and, if it were up to me, you would be legally obligated to wear a helmet with the letters "M C S E" in flashing neon.
This is precisely why I will never buy any computer hardware from a computer store or consultant who has opened the baggie. If the seal is broken, don't take it. Ever.
Time to build: Even though we'd leverage Ghost wherever possible, handmade systems nevertheless take time to build, load, & configure.
Yes. But make damned sure that you're building them as an assembly line. The principle is that building a second one will only take 50% more effort than building the first; the third will take only 33% more effort than the other two, etc. Whatever old Henry Ford's theorem was. It works.
Set aside a room where no one else will bother you. *GOOD STATIC CONTROL* is mandatory. Do all stages of assembly at once, that way you're not wasting time fumbling back and forth for screwdrivers. Get going at a good clip with quality cases, and you should be able to assemble 100 systems/day - but that assumes you have *everything* where you need it when you need it, there's good padded shelving, and you've got a grunt taking care of taking cases out of boxes for you. It also excludes software load.
Just make sure you get a warranty on all the parts since you will not have one on the entire machine
Absolutely. But, assuming a competent builder (ie. not blowing processors with bad jumper settings or blowing boards by not having them seated right), the parts themselves should be pretty reliable. If you're buying good stuff, the biggest source of problems will probably be static handling.
Keep in mind that a modern memory or processor chip has literally millions of CMOS transistors. CMOS transistors have an incredibly thin layer of glass between the gate input and the source-drain circuit. A voltage applied to the gate influences the flow of current through the source-drain circuit. Trick is, the layer of glass involved is so thin that you can punch a hole in it with 30V. Next trick is that static electricity generates kilovolts (thousands of volts) with sufficient current to blow holes in the gate layer, but be imperceptible to you.
All it takes is one transistor out of the millions inside a modern chip to be defective and the computer will crash apparently at random... you know, when Windows VMM writes a 0 to a memory address and gets it back as a 1 later on... BSoD. Kernel Panic. Choose your flavor.
Wrist straps, static baggies, conductive floors, grounded workstations are *crucial*. Dell, Compaq, Asus and Abit spend millions of $$ on these things, and for similar reliability, you should demand the same standards every step of the way for your home-rolled machines. Make sure your computer store hasn't "helped" you by opening the static baggies. Write that one into the contract with the computer store. And make sure that the hard disk drives are still in their packing "egg-crate" things. You really don't want a box with a stack of hard disk drives. (Western Digital had a great video on hard drive handling floating around the 'Net, you should view it if you're building en masse.)
I saw both Toy Story 2 and Monsters, Inc. on the DLP at the Cinemark Legacy in Plano. Three things really blew me away. First, it's bright! When the green "the following preview has been approved..." slate goes up, the sheer amount of light coming back off that screen is just amazing.
I used to work for a video company. We rented out Hughes/JVC ILA video projectors, $250,000 each, circa 1993. Nothing compared to the ones at the Famous Players down the road from my house, but we'd light cigarettes off the lenses of these things. I loved those Hughes. 1024x768 at 72Hz refresh and x-deflection up to 55kHz in 1993. Man, did I ever love those things.
The next thing that surprised me is the noise: there isn't any. You don't notice the sound of the projector (that "tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh" sound of the gate opening and closing) until it's gone. When the house lights go down before the movie starts, it's completely silent in the theater, which is pretty cool.
Not just the audio noise of the film being snapped through the gate and the shutter exposing the screen, but also the video noise - dust, cigarette burns in the film, color differences when the alternate projector spins up and the system switches to another reel. Just a perfect image, silent, solid, stable and bright.
My first ever digital movie experience was The Mummy. I was with friends and we were in a trippy sort of mood. One of them was a roadie, and sure enough, out came the acid. Three hits of good old 1960s blotter, sat down in the movie theater, and I was convinced that my brain was going to melt. The carpet was attacking me. And then I experienced a digital movie projector for my first time. That was powerful enough, but imagine the effects of a digital projector, acid and The Mummy all at once. (Those who don't know what I'm talking about are encouraged to see the movie "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas", then view "The Mummy" in that mindset.)
Every scene from that movie is burned into my brain. And I think I'm probably the only person I know who actually enjoyed The Mummy.
This is what I remember from Physics 101. However, I may be wrong, seeing as you are the one claiming to be the "physics geek". In any case, however, your definition is contrary to standard, correct English usage.
Actually, he's right, and you're right. The centripetal force is the force acting towards the center, which has to counteract the object's tendency to continue forward in a straight line at a given speed. The centrifugal force, of course, is the apparent push outward from the center. In actual fact, the object wishes to go 90 degrees to the radius of its circle.
The only problem I counld think of for such a device is that I don't think normal optical media will work as expected if you read it at a low angle.
The reflected beam will bounce off at 90 degrees to the incident beam; it will not return to your spinning mirror for neat and efficient collection.
The pits pressed onto a CD are exactly 1/4 of the wavelength of the IR light which reads them. The light is generated by a laser. The requirement for a laser is based on the fact that laser light occupies a very narrow spectrum, tighter than an LED, and certainly more so than any conventional light source with a filter.
Now, if you think about what happens to the light which falls into a 1/4 wavelength deep pit and gets reflected back out, you'll see why both wavelength and incident angles are extremely critical to the proper operating of an optical drive.
Hint for the clueless: think of degrees of a sinewave; 1/4 wavelength = 90 degrees. 2*(1/4) = 1/2 wavelength = 180 degrees. Draw two sinewaves of equal magnitude at 180 degrees to each other. For each value of x, add y1 and y2. Whaddaya get?
All the same, that was a hell of a nice effort for a 12-year-old. At the time, I wasn't inventing, I was just tearing apart old color TV sets I'd find in the garbage. Times tables suck, I agree. Calculus is fun, though, since the whole thing (first principles of differentiation) is a really cool dodge around the silly problem of not being able to divide by zero.
By the way, the lands are not binary ones and the pits are not binary zeros, as you might think intuitively. The *transition* from a pit to a land or from a land to a pit represents one value; the lack of a transition represents the other.
Show them scripting, show them administrative task automation, show them remote consoles and X, out of the box, no additional software, show them the C API, clean, documented, show them the daemons. If they dig it, good.
KDE kicks butt, but Microsoft still has the best desktop overall. Unfortunately.
You have to look at this from their perspective. They've been suckered in by the party line enough to go for a.NET certification. They know Windows desktops and filesystems, the myriad software available, the little glitches that plague in Windows and the pitfalls to avoid.
They believe that Windows can do everything that Linux/UNIX can. And for the most part, they're right. Sorry, but Windows even does some of it better - GUI, installation.
Before you show them any of the Linux/UNIX tools and freak them out because kmail doesn't have a convenient pop-up autocomplete address bar, or Mozilla doesn't render Yahoo quite right at 1024x768, or that there's no concept of default file extensions ("what do you mean I have to choose a player for an fscking.wav file?"), show them the one thing they're gonna be most interested in, if they're serious about using the.NET training they're taking.
Uptime is so much more than a number. It's a sales tool. And we're trying to sell the world on alternatives to Windows.
Remember, to a Windows user, long uptime is...
...freedom from blue screens.
...freedom from freezing.
...freedom from the system getting gradually and inexplicably slower even though Task Manager says nothing is wrong, until finally you hit the scram switch in frustration.
...freedom from having to reboot the computer every week when a new IIS patch has to be installed, and the ability to update Apache, bind, etc. by simply installing it and restarting that daemon.
...freedom from having to listen to users whine that the mail server is down for the three minutes it takes for the thing to come back up.
...elusive.
It's worth pointing out to these people that all the longest-running servers on Netcraft's web server survey are *not* running Windows. Not one of them. Microsoft fans will argue that IIS wasn't out when some of the machines in Netcraft's top uptime list were last rebooted. Not true: IIS came out with NT 4.0 if not before, and that was 1996, far more than ~1250 days of uptime the longest-running Netcraft record-holders have been up.
Even so, thinking back on it, reminding these people that Windows 2000 was still on the horizon and pets.com was still attracting investors when these machines were last rebooted, ought to be a selling feature.
My server is a selling feature, too. www.glowingplate.com is currently running on a Pentium 90. It's been up and running for 101 days, generates a lot of pages dynamically for about 5,000 Google visitors a day, usually keeps a CPU load of 1-3, and was last down because of a power failure.
Not a world record uptime or performance load. Hell, it's still even running the distro's stock kernel. But I've never seen anything like it with IIS.
We are like the people on the street with uncut grass and old broken down crap strewn all around our yard. Nobody wants to come over and say hello because they assume the residents are low lifes. If we do get a visit, it may be the head of the galaxy association telling us to take down the tacky mood decorations and clean the junk out of our space.
Or not. Judging from my experience when I leave old junked cars and major appliances in my front yard, it's a great way to make new friends and the encounter would go more like this:
Interstellar pickup truck with interstellar Confederate flag comes up to the edge of our debris field. Occupant gets out, picks his way gingerly down to the surface, knocks on International Space Agency's door.
"Hi there. I wuz just drivin' by, and I was wundrin, is y'all still usin' that there Iridium system you'se've got still orbitin' yer planet? I got sompin' like it at home and I need some parts. Kin I take it off'n yer hands fer a coupla cases of beer? Thank-ye kindly."
Website at the end of my .Sig.
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I just have to know: have any administrators that you know of actually done "format c:/u" thinking it would do something other than wipe their Win partition clean?
Well, I received a very angry e-mail from someone screaming at me that they "destroyed their computer" by following the instructions on my website.
My reply was that they were welcomed to follow my advice, but since the Internet is a fertile ground of alternative viewpoints, even the remotest inkling of intelligence might suggest that one may seek a second opinion prior to typing the fateful instructions.
Of course, depending on the version of Windows involved, different things will happen. I deliberately tried it on an old Windows 95 installation I had kicking around, and the machine didn't crash but it wouldn't reboot, either. So the number of people who may have followed these instructions is difficult to ascertain by feedback; I would suspect that most of these imbeciles would have a hard time finding the site to contact me afterwards.
I do get 3,000+ Google-inspired hits a day. If 1% of them follows the instructions, then 30 people will have newly-cleaned hard disk drives every day.
I guess it's a good thing for them that they didn't accidentally stumble onto some of the more questionable medical sites on the 'Net.
DeLorean Driver's Side Gullwing Door For Sale
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Dude - it was a Delorean because it has those cool gull wing doors
DeLorean door for sale, FOB Toronto/Ottawa, Canada. Best offer.
Comes with door wiring harness. No glass, no prop cylinders, no inner door skins, no mirror, no lock or latch.
Sheetmetal is perfect, with the exception of a slight dent near the lock cylinder hole; it looks like someone attempted to break into the car, and a mark which looks like it might have been inflicted by a shopping cart.
Came off a 1983 DeLorean being restored to show-car quality, but this door is perfectly well suited to a driver DeLorean with accident damage, or for hanging on the wall. Will fit any DMC-12 coupe from 1981-1983.
Very large and awkwardly-shaped. Shipping will be expensive.
I don't know why there's so much hate towards ricecars.
Because they think their cars are fast, they all drive like they think they're in The Fast and The Furious, and yet there's no science in their construction of a "fast" car.
If the rice crowd things ugly-ass aluminum wings and neons are cool then let them go ahead and do it, no harm.
It becomes my problem when I'm sharing the road with people who put clear taillights on their cars. Clear tail light lenses don't usually have cat-eye reflectors, making parked ricer cars a danger on night streets. The clear lenses are usually colored red by GE 1157 light bulbs dipped in red paint. The resulting pinkish brake lights are not an SAE-approved color and are therefore a safety hazard. The idiots who cover over parts of their taillights to reduce the surface area and give it a "custom" look are equally stupid. Deliberately reducing the effectiveness of your brake light system is grounds for being nominated for a Darwin Award after an 18-wheeler demolishes you in the fog.
Playing with your suspension geometry by hacking coil springs is a good one. There's nothing like watching some guy driving down the road with hideously expensive low-profile tires on his 1990 Honda Accord, with the suspension so badly butchered that his $300 apiece tires are being lunched by his bad camber. Of course, bad camber = bad contact with the road, not a good safety feature for any car let alone a "performance" car.
And probably most stupid is the let's-hack-off-a-windshield-wiper-to-look-Euro. Uh-huh. It's a good idea to reduce your visibility in inclement weather because you think it will go faster or look better.
On the other hand, I can't understand why anyone is willing to buy a car that only gets 15 miles to the gallon and then modify it so it only gets 8.
Because there's no replacement for displacement. The biggest killer for gas mileage on my truck is not the 400 CID motor, but the tall rear-axle gears. They're great for acceleration, they're great for when I'm towing a trailer, but they're bad on the highway because, without an overdrive (most vehicles of that age didn't have overdrive top gears), my engine is spinning 4000 RPM at 55MPH. A 6.6L (400CID) engine spinning at 4000 RPM will consume a lot of fuel.
Interestingly, that engine could easily propel the truck at 55MPH with an engine speed of about 2000RPM, by my calculations, the motor has sufficient torque at that RPM, and it would get more than twice the gas mileage. I'd have to find a Mopar automatic transmission with an overdrive and a big-block bell-housing pattern (not easy to find) or I could convert it to stickshift, which is my plan. I already have an old A-833 4-speed OD transmission for it, now all I need is a big-block bell housing. ($$$)
Of course, I could just drop the rear-end gear ratio from the current 4.11 to about 2.25s, but I really like the acceleration, and I need the raw power when I've got 5,000lbs of trailer on my truck's tongue and I want onto a freeway.
I spend ~$300/mo in fuel, and I drive something that I really like. The alternative would be to spend ~$300/mo to buy a brand new tinfoil shitbox that I really don't like.
Umm..actually, my little jap race car is far from cramped, on the contrary, it's quite roomy for a 2x2. I'd be willing to be that it has more room than a 3-series coupe.
Possibly, but I'm 6'4". I stick with American cars, because they're the only ones into which I fit comfortably.
It also has real Recaro seats, which I may add, are very comfortable; and if you know anything about cars, then you know what Recaros are.
No, actually, I've rebuilt engines. I rewired a 1957 Imperial Limousine which was used when the Queen visited Canada. And I helped a professional coachbuilder with the final body assembly of the restoration of a Cord (note, Cord, not Accord). I've heard the name "Recaro" bandied about by those who think they know a lot about cars but don't know a crowfoot wrench from a distributor wrench. I think I know something about cars, yet I don't know why the name Recaro is so important to ricers.
I do know what Simpson seats are, are these similar?
Please, thrall me with your acumen.
In fact, my ex-boss owns an M3 that falls apart far more than my "jap" car. To BMW, you buy a $60k car, and they give you an $8 POS wrench (to fix the crappy car you just bought) that you'll break within the first week.
A "POS" wrench? Explain. For despite knowing how to use an English wheel, I'm unclear as to what a POS wrench would be.
Not to mention, my car would beat said german car in any race, straight line or not, thanks to its 2300lb. curb weight,
During acceleration, inertia effectively throws the weight of the car back, resulting in less pressure pushing the front wheels into contact with the road. Your little FWD econobox therefore will have a harder time getting traction under acceleration. There's a reason why virtually all classes of professional racing, from NHRA to NASCAR to F1 to Ralleye, do not use front wheel drive cars.
But I'm sure you already knew that, for you are smarter than I because you know what Recaro seats are.
Lotus tuned suspension (Yes, thats Lotus, as in Lotus Elise),
"My Celeron will beat your Cray!"
"Why?"
"Because I tuned it."
[sigh]
Dude. Does your car have MacPherson struts on the front suspension? Yes? If so, then the very design of your car introduces a handling error that you cannot work around.
MacPherson struts are popular because they're cheap and light.
Performance vehicles almost universally use a double-A-arm and coil spring or double-A-arm and torsion bar system, because the pivot during steering can be dead center in the wheel if you have the right rim offset.
With a MacPherson strut, it's at the top plates. Measure the distance from your struts' top plates to the centerline of each front wheel. The distance from that pivot point to the centerline of the wheel can be seen as the pivot offset, and would be the longest (non-hypotenuse) side of a right-angled triangle. Turn the steering wheel to the end of its travel, measure the angle of rotation about the pivot point, and use sin (theta) = (opposite) / (hypotenuse) to solve for (opposite). That number is how much your wheel moves forward or back within its wheel well as you steer. Less is, obviously, better.
But I'm sure you already knew that, because you also know that little green Lotus stickers on your fenders make your car go faster, right?
and AWD. Oh, did I forget to mention the highly turbocharged inline-4? Ooops.
"All Wheel Drive" = transverse mount front-wheel-drive with a chain driving a slipping clutch differential on the rear wheels. Or some similar variant, where the car is primarily front wheel drive and the rear wheels have only differential power applied.
Test for that? Jack up the front of the car. Place it on jack stands. Start the car, put your foot on the brakes and then put it into drive. (If you know how to drive a stickshift, you'd put it into 1st gear and let out the clutch at the friction point.) Okay. Your speedometer is moving, but you aren't: your front wheels are spinning, and the rear wheels are stationary. That's All-Wheel-Drive. Differential effect won't couple power to the rear wheels when the front wheels are slipping. So what's the point?
Slight advantage during cornering, with all four wheels on the ground, but mostly the marketing makes hausfrau think that they won't get stuck in snow.
Wow. "Highly turbocharged". What's your wastegate set to? How convinced are you that his BMW is "falling apart" whilst your "highly turbocharged" motor is gonna last?
Take a Celeron 500. Overclock it to 1GHz. Compare it to a Pentium III @800MHz. Wow. You're faster. But how long will it last before thermal cycling cracks the silicon die?
Oh wait...my car's 13 years old...
Ah. "Lotus Tuned" and 13 years old. Wow. You've got an Isuzu. You're so cool. People in Kias must look down on you, but you're the envy of every Excel owner.
Oh yeah, and those Isuzus *do* have MacPherson struts. I've changed them. No, you could *not* outhandle a Beamer. In fact, you couldn't outhandle a 1971 Chevrolet Impala with a loose tie-rod end and a broken sway-bar, but I'm sure you already knew that.
no you're right, german cars do last longer. Now, let me go find a VW Corrado G60 that hasnt had $3000 worth of supercharger problems....
Lemme find an Isuzu that's still worth $300 by the time it's 10 years old.
Have you checked where your A-pillars meet the firewall? The Isuzu Impulse and the Stylus both seem to generate tiny little stress fractures there because there's too much body flex. You might want to pull out your MIG welder and box that area a little.
Oh... Mommy won't let you have a MIG welder? Wow, that's a bummer. And yet you're inspiring because you've overcome that sufficiently to be such an authority on cars.
Wow. I bet the chicks just dig your 17-year-old pimply ass in your 13-year-old Isuzu. Does it help you get laid? Can I be your friend?
I don't have the link, but I saw a video on Consumption Junction of a Viper getting owned by a shitty little Civic.
It's unlikely, but not impossible.
Acceleration is all about power to weight ratio, and then how well you get that power to the ground.
First off, economics. I can go to a wrecking yard, spend $50 for a used Chevy 350 from a junked taxicab, spend $1000 having it machined and then another $2000 on assorted parts, assemble it myself, and get (conservatively) 400HP from it.
To get anywhere near that kind of power from a smaller engine (1.6L = ~95 CID), the engine must be revved up all to hell, and the machining tolerances must therefore be extremely tight - spending lots of labor having pistons balanced to within 1/100th of a gram, versus 1/10th of a gram like you could do with the 350. Yes, the newer engine's head will flow better than a 350, yes, there's less reciprocating mass because it's just a sewing machine. But to get the volumetric efficiency and torque curves high enough to do that without grenading, you're adding a turbo, porting the heads, etc. Aftermarket parts are far more expensive for those motors, and the knowledge base of guys who've built up Civics for serious power is a lot less than the skill and number of guys who've built up 350s. Expect to spend $10-15k by the time all is said and done.
Now, gearing. A Viper's first and second gear are agressive, but the car is designed for top-end speed, which is reflected in the design of the brakes and suspension. The Viper will be quick off the line (1st and 2nd) but the motor will have more room to wind in 3-6, to allow the RPMs to be reasonable at 100+MPH.
If the Civic is anywhere near as quick as the Viper off the line, he's obviously not only built up the engine but also the drivetrain (which would break if too much power was applied to it). While building a tough engine, therefore, the guy in the Civic would have had to build a transmission to survive the forces the engine is passing through it. At the same time, he would have changed the gear ratios for acceleration.
A big strong guy on a bicycle stuck in tenth gear won't out-accelerate a puny guy shifting his derailleur from 1 through 5.
Having said that, even geared for speed rather than acceleration, a Viper still turns low 13s. That's about 13.2 seconds from stopped to the end of a quarter mile. It's quicker than most production cars, but certainly not fast when you're talking about building for performance. My (stock) 1976 Ram with the 400 (6.6L) engine does it in about 14.8.
By comparison, I built a Chevette with a Buick 3.8L V6 under the hood. It turned 12.8 seconds on the 1/4 mile - slightly faster than a Viper. But, there's no way it could attain let alone maintain 150MPH the way a Viper could. Buy a Mustang 5.0, slap headers, cam, 4-bbl intake and carb at it, and you're faster off the line than a Viper.
We still haven't even gotten into a question of driving skill. Lots of people who own Vipers know nothing about cars. They're dot-com CEOs and accountants who don't know anything about cars. Is he sidestepping the clutch to hold the engine at its peak torque curve? If he's not, he's not making full use of the power.
A V12 getting owned by whatever is in those Rice Burners..
I'm not sure if it's possible for an inanimate object to possess another inanimate object.
Last Viper I drove had a V10, actually, rather similar to this one which you can order at the parts counter at any Chrylser dealership. And, while I imagine you understand the concept of cylinders, I will assume that you don't understand the concept of displacement. Here's the relationship in a nutshell: All other things being equal, a Ford 300 inline 6-cylinder would probably outperform a Ford 302 V8. Why? The 6-cylinder motor has two less pistons dragging up and down, two less pairs of valves, two less connecting rod bearings - but still pumps through almost (2 cubic inches difference) as much air as the V8.
Cylinders are not everything. You don't get your power from having more cylinders, you get it from having more displacement. Cylinders merely divide the displacement into manageable chunks.
By the way, you'll note that the Viper's motor is 488 cubic inches. About 8.0L.
Even if the dude in the Viper could not drive worth a shit, as the car approached 100 I am sure the V12 would have quite a bit of influence... If you were correct, then the Viper would have won.
Yup. Though it does take nearly a quarter of a mile for a Viper to get up to 100MPH from a stop. Most street races are significantly less than that.
Even so, either the guy in the Honda spent more doing that than it would have cost him to buy a Viper, or the guy in the Viper was the typical Viper-driver.
Ask yourself this. The Viper has a large displacement engine (488CID) and is rear-wheel-drive. The Honda has a small displacement engine (~95CID, too lazy to calculate it right now) and is front-wheel-drive.
Virtually all performance cars have a large displacement and are rear-wheel-drive - From Aston-Martin to Vector to Viper, with Porsche, Ferrari, Llamborghini, 1960s-1970s American musclecars, NASCAR, NHRA, serious ralleye, etc. in there.
Virtually all economy cars have a small displacement and are front-wheel-drive. The Honda is in the same high class as Tercels, Ford Escorts, Renault 5, VW Rabbit, Dodge Aries/Plymouth Reliant, Nissan Micra, etc.
Currently, about $0.75/L. Yes, the truck is hugely expensive. But, I figured, I could either spend $300/mo on fuel and drive something I like, or I could spend $300/mo on a new car that I don't really like.
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Polonium was also used on spark plugs for a while during the "atomic age". Neat idea, ionizing radiation lets you set the electrodes further apart. Found a picture of them here.
Sounds plausible, but I'm not sure how well they'd work, nor am I sure how much polonium would end up reacting chemically during combustion and leaving the tailpipe as a dangerous radioactive compound, but I've seen them before and thought they were amusing.
Better watch out or every homey with a V-Tec sticker on his Honda Civic will be trying to screw 1940s spark plugs into his head so he can have a "nuclear-powered" 4-cylinder wanna-be racecar.
Heheh.
I found a basket full of buggers out of a few old TV sets on a friend's property last week. They tend to weather the elements pretty well.
Sadly, TV tubes don't tend to be very valuable. With the number of 6GH8As that I have, one would think that I should be a millionaire, but most people don't need a bandpass amplifier for a 1960s color TV.
I've grabbed a few tubes out of the backs of radios, TVs and industrial equipment I've found mostly in (primarily) automotive junkyards. Usually the type number is washed off the glass, making the tube nearly useless. If you can tell a triode from a pentode by looking through the glass, you can make guesses and then careful analysis on the tube tester, but that assumes the tube was good to begin with.
Only TV tube I've ever got like that which was useful and rare enough to warrant the effort was a 6BK4. Fortunately, those are pretty easy to spot through the glass, it looks like a death ray in there. (High voltage triode, designed as a shunt regulator in early (late 1950s) color TV sets.)
Yes. Plenty.
The car radio was not invented with the transistor. Motorola, who was originally founded to make "Motor Victrolas", ie. car audio, branched into semiconductors almost as soon as it was seen that they had practical aspects in car radios.
In the beginning, car radios had tubes. Tubes require filament power as well as the power and B+ power. The parallel would be a transistor radio which needs a 9V battery (main power) to power the radio and a whole bunch of 1.5V D cells (filament power) to keep the transistors warm enough to work.
The filaments of appropriate tubes will run happily off 12V, but they still need something from about 90V to 250V for main power (known as B+ or plate supply). Back then, cars ran off 6V or 12V electrical systems, and this had to provide sufficient voltage for the radio. Before transistors and switching power supplies, there was only one way: the vibrator.
Sexual references aside, a vibrator is basically a relay wired to break its circuit when it's turned on. The raspy buzz chopped a circuit on and off, which made DC from the car's electrical system into a pulsetrain which drove a small transformer. The transformer stepped up the voltage and it was rectified in the usual way for the era: a small recifier tube. Of course, this was highly inefficient and noisy.
Never mind that the car radio would take several amps while it was on, and these were in the days before alternators. Less efficient generators and battery technology meant that leaving the radio on for too long while in traffic would run down the battery to the point where the ignition system stopped - and so did you.
Durability was another issue. Tubes are held in their sockets by friction, and would have a tendency to vibrate out of their sockets, making the radio fail. The "loctal" base was invented to deal with this. It was a base design where the tube's keyway was notched and would hold the tube with a spring on the base. They're a pain in the ass since they always corrode in the locked position and you often break the tube trying to get it out of the socket.
Tubes are basically light bulbs with a whole bunch of closely-spaced wires, grids and sheetmetal electrodes. If they move relative to each other, the electrical characteristics of the tube change - and therefore so does the behavior of the radio. This effect is called "microphonics". Not to mention vibration fatigue causing shorts, cracked glass and vacuum loss, etc. Tubes don't like vibrations. If don't believe me, hit your monitor a few times.
While I love tubes, a car stereo is about the last place they belong.
On this site you can see what a 1930s car radio looked like. Note that the radio was too large to fit in the dashboard and often ended up in the passenger's footwell. A "control head" was a set of remote volume and tuning knobs on the dashboard; they were usually connected by a cable arrangement similar to speedometer or bicycle brake cables.
Background? I collect and restore antique TV sets and 1960s/1970s musclecars. Lots of my friends are into 1930s and 1940s cars, and often get me to fix their vintage tube car radios so that the full experience of driving a car of that era can be preserved.
Sterephile reports about the Panasonic CQ-TX5500D(link to Japanese site) car stereo that uses a vaccuum tube, with analog vu-meters. It also plays mp3 files 8-) Naturally, this is for the Japan market only."Even with a modern DC-DC converter powering the B+ circuit, what a profoundly stupid idea.
While I really like the fact that it plays MP3s, this is just more stuff for homiez with gold chains, small cars, and smaller penises.
Can't wait until "Da Bass" people get their hands on this. A car stereo which can bounce quarters on the roof of the car will be more than sufficient to make the tube microphonic. Feedback between the subs and the tube will result in blown subs, toasted amplifiers, and no more din of license plates rattling on every rusting 1984 Prelude at every traffic light.
it's about as close to a geek house of horrors you can get...
No, this line is:
Power triode. Similar in size to power tubes used on the early computers, but this particular tube type is brand-new. It can be compared with a power transistor of comparable power rating.The image of the tube in question shows an Eimac transmitting triode.
Computer equipment? Only if ENIAC had an early 50MHz wireless trans-Atlantic LAN that we don't know about.
Funny thing, though - Monster Cable is pretty crappy cabling, but for guitar cables, the D'Addario PlanetWaves cables are actually exceptional. And they come in shiny blister packs (or rather, you CAN buy them in shiny blister backs, or in braids).
Feh. I'll stick with the stuff the pros use: light duty work (recording studios, etc.) is HPN heater cord. About 6 cents per foot at Home Depot. :)
Rigging arrayable speakers for use in stadiums (rock concerts), we'd run tin-plated copper stranded distribution cable (pole-to-house wire) for long runs and 8 or 10 AWG 2-conductor jacketed cable. The distro cable was used primarily for heavy metal concerts at smaller venues like the 50,000 seat SkyDome. [grin] Anything bigger and you'd fly the amps in the rigging, too.
Agreed!
For guitars, tube amps just sound better. Digital modelling, etc., all try to REPRODUCE the sound of a tube amps, not best it. That's fairly telling. The reasons tube amps sound better for guitars are varied, but are mostly centered around overdriving the amp. The distortion comes on very smoothly as you roll the volume up, and responds to dynamics much better.A very big point with guitar amps is microphonics. Since the amplifier chassis tends to be built into the same cabinet as the speaker, all the tubes are vibrating with each note. This does all sorts of neat things to the sound, since the elements (plate, grid(s), cathode) are all vibrating with respect to each other. In REproduction, microphonic tubes are a very bad thing. But in a guitar amp, the amplifier is absolutely part of the instrument.
Some of the best audiophile home stereos I've heard have been tube (mid 70's Marantz gear), and some have been transistor (late 70's Marantz gear). But tube amps are just NOT cost effective anymore, and almost all of the supposed advantages are just audiophile snobbery.Agreed. Most of today's tube fascination is unjustified.
A tube output amplifier is *not* a high fidelity device in this day and age - by using tubes, you're forcing yourself to deal with the nonlinearities in the behavior of the tubes and, more importantly, of the output transformer which impedance-matches the tube to the speaker. Building a transformer to be a "straight wire with impedance matching" at any sort of power from 20Hz to 20kHz is non trivial, from the core up. (Power transformers from 50/60Hz are big and heavy, full of laminated iron sheets. Transformers for 15kHz (TV flyback transformer) are ferrite-cored. Hugely different magnetic properties of the core, and both of those devices are *within* the audio range!) There is no logical or rational reason, in this day and age, to use a tube output stage in a non-guitar amplifier.
However, in small signal stages, things are different. Since tubes run at higher voltages than comparable solid state components, induced noise is less significant. If your audio signal is floating around on a DC offset of 140V and you're inducing 500mV of noise into it, that's a hell of a lot less obtrusive than the same 500mV of noise induced on a 12V offset. Never mind that the interstage amplitudes also tend to be higher. There are a couple of issues, here, though. Tubes are larger, meaning that they have larger areas of conductors to pick up noise than, let's say, a surface-mount MOSFET on a ground-plane PC board. And vibration is strictly verboten; we don't want to color the music.
And tubes amplifiers tend to have high input and output impedances, which makes them ideal for pre-amp stages.
Audiophiles like tubes for the wrong reasons. If tubes add "warmth" to your music, the amplifier is probably driving them too hard and you're attenuating the high end (ie. poor design). But if a tube amplifier is indistinguishable from a semiconductor amplifier except that there's less hiss, then the tubes are doing their jobs.
As I told an "audiophile" once, they don't use Monster Cables in the recording studio... Balanced line XLR. Good engineering is always better than cheap crap sold in shiny blister packs. :)
I wonder what is next? Power through my cable tv line?
Too late.
Several models of Sterivision hospital TV sets use that already. These are the easily-removed pay-to-watch-Jerry-Springer-from-your-deathbed TV sets that hospitals charge for.
Since they're installed only on demand, they have to be simple and easy to connect... one wire. They seem to run off 12VDC driven down the coax. Isolating the RF for the tuner is a simple matter of a couple of small capacitors.
Lots of TV antenna amplifiers also use a technique like this to avoid having to run power and coax wires up a (possibly tall) TV antenna tower. Radio Shack used to sell such a system.
Of course, the practical current is limited only by the resistance of the coax. (Resistance is *not* impedance, don't confuse 75 ohm impedance with the DC resistance of the cable.) If someone built superconductive coax, there'd be no DC resistance, and you could power your house and get RoadRunner cable Interet on the same wire... :)
remember the old amstrad 512 and 640 well if you were upgrading the 512 to 640kb ior ram you had to uinsert chips manually and they reccomemded putting it on the kitchen sink, grounded through the buildings earthing and touching metail before a chip or PCB.
Yeah. It was a new thing, all this new-fangled CMOS. :) The good old days, when motherboards were full of TTL logic (SN74xx), the Internet connection was a 300 baud acoustic-coupled modem, and UUCP e-mail was too complicated for spammers to have figured out.
[sigh]
wow, not only are you running your domain off a pentium 90, but you also have reverse DNS lookup turned on in the logs... that's gotta be giving you a decent preformance hit, no?
Well, it doesn't actually handle DNS; that's felix, an old 486DX-33 running FreeBSD, port-forwarded behind my gateway (I've only got the one IP address). But yeah, I'm sure each logger thread gets held up waiting for resolution.
More impressively, dynamic content. (Most of the pages are generated dynamically as shtml through the x-bit hack; nothing sophisticated, mostly just inserting templates and stuff for color scheme because I'm too lazy to type long BODY tags) And anywhere from 2,000 to 5,000 hits per day. And only 48 megs of RAM. And it's a popular Linux distro's default kernel, not recompiled for that machine. Even so, it hardly ever breaks a sweat.
As you can tell, it's like, zero performance tuning. But it still cranks out a SETI@Home unit every day or two.
As for reverse DNS itself, yeah, I like it. :) It's a nice luxury.
Are google claiming that they can check through the entire internet inside a timescale of 3 months, ready to check through again at the start of the next quarter?
I don't know if that's all that far-fetched. I know Googlebot last hit my site on April 7th, crawled every page in my domain over the course of 12 hours, and current searches of their cache show content I'd updated at that time. They seem to visit every month or so.
Perhaps it's based on the traffic they detect to a given site through their CGI redirects... but I'm not a large site, my primary webserver is a Pentium 90. :)
crawl4.googlebot.com - - [07/Apr/2002:13:36:32 -0400] "GET /broken_microsoft_products/ HTTP/1.0" 200 128854 "-" "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)"
As far as the "to unplug or not to unplug" debate, there is probably a credible argument that even though you don't have a good ground when the case if off and unplugged, things like static electricity will dissipate whenever you touch a large metal object like the chassis, due to leakage effects.
Get a grounded (three-prong) plug, high-value resistors, some 24AWG wire and an alligator clip. Stick ~10 megs between the ground pin on the plug and the wire. Crimp the alligator clip onto the end. Plug it into a wall socket, and clip the lead onto the chassis.
Or, you can consider that the monitor and the computer are grounded to each other by the shell of the VGA connector, which is connected to the backsplash, cabinet and motherboard ground plane. If the monitor is plugged in, and the computer is plugged into the monitor, then you can unplug a (risky) ATX supply and at least have some measure of grounding.
I leave the PC plugged in, if you turn the wall plug off the earth is still connected so you are earthed by touching the chassis.
It's better than nothing, but if you did that while working on the Space Shuttle's guidance computers, you'd probably be bludgeoned. And rightly so.
I'm going to chicken out and post this anonymously. I was a Navy component level electronics techy guy, then I worked for Nortel doing pretty much the same thing, then i opened my own computer store and built thousands of custom systems. I used "critical, sound ESD principles" only about 1% of that time.
Oh good.
Speaking as a taxpayer who is forced to fund Northern Telecom by Jean Poutine and The Party, I'm glad to know that they're hiring competent people.
it's a bunch of crap. just avoid touching the contacts,ie. don't touch the non-conductive parts of a given board or assembly? This is static electricity, the excess or absence of electrons on a non-conductive surface that we're worried about. When errant static charges find equilibrium through a conductor (or a silicon dioxide gate layer in a MOSFET) is when a damaging current flows. If your conjecture were true, it wouldn't be possible to rub a balloon on your head and have it stick to a wall.
I used to work for Litton before we were bought up by Northrup Grumman and our divison was closed. I did component-level design on radar systems for a company that builds aircraft carriers and cruise missile guidance computers. Wanna tell me about static control?
don't use a metal workbench thats not grounded,Grounded or not, don't use a metal workbench. What happens to the clock/CMOS battery on a motherboard if you place the board on a metal workbench?
put some anti-static material on your working area.Conductive (>100,000 ohms/inch is usually okay) foam or rubber mat on the work surface. Grounded to the same place as your heel/wrist strap and the computer on which you're working. Essential. Equipment to do it won't cost you more than $40.
Oh yeah, and don't ground yourself directly. Stick a high value resistor between the subassembly that is you and the ground to which you wish to connect yourself. That way, if you come into contact with a live conductor somewhere, the resistor will limit the current and the unpleasantness.
don't concern yourself with the rest of that crap, unless you just want to, or if for some reason you have to work in a charged room.30V to punch a gate junction. You can generate a hundred times that by wearing cotton and sitting on a polyester seatcushion.
But don't think you have to waste money on it, you don't.Nope, an insanely cost-sensitive company like Dell, making 5% margins on $2,000 liabilities in a cut-throat industry, does it just because they like to subsidize 3M's silver plastic baggie division.
just don't handle the parts in a stupid fashion.Like the one you're advocating.
You are dangerous and, if it were up to me, you would be legally obligated to wear a helmet with the letters "M C S E" in flashing neon.
This is precisely why I will never buy any computer hardware from a computer store or consultant who has opened the baggie. If the seal is broken, don't take it. Ever.
Time to build: Even though we'd leverage Ghost wherever possible, handmade systems nevertheless take time to build, load, & configure.
Yes. But make damned sure that you're building them as an assembly line. The principle is that building a second one will only take 50% more effort than building the first; the third will take only 33% more effort than the other two, etc. Whatever old Henry Ford's theorem was. It works.
Set aside a room where no one else will bother you. *GOOD STATIC CONTROL* is mandatory. Do all stages of assembly at once, that way you're not wasting time fumbling back and forth for screwdrivers. Get going at a good clip with quality cases, and you should be able to assemble 100 systems/day - but that assumes you have *everything* where you need it when you need it, there's good padded shelving, and you've got a grunt taking care of taking cases out of boxes for you. It also excludes software load.
Just make sure you get a warranty on all the parts since you will not have one on the entire machineAbsolutely. But, assuming a competent builder (ie. not blowing processors with bad jumper settings or blowing boards by not having them seated right), the parts themselves should be pretty reliable. If you're buying good stuff, the biggest source of problems will probably be static handling.
Keep in mind that a modern memory or processor chip has literally millions of CMOS transistors. CMOS transistors have an incredibly thin layer of glass between the gate input and the source-drain circuit. A voltage applied to the gate influences the flow of current through the source-drain circuit. Trick is, the layer of glass involved is so thin that you can punch a hole in it with 30V. Next trick is that static electricity generates kilovolts (thousands of volts) with sufficient current to blow holes in the gate layer, but be imperceptible to you.
All it takes is one transistor out of the millions inside a modern chip to be defective and the computer will crash apparently at random... you know, when Windows VMM writes a 0 to a memory address and gets it back as a 1 later on... BSoD. Kernel Panic. Choose your flavor.
Wrist straps, static baggies, conductive floors, grounded workstations are *crucial*. Dell, Compaq, Asus and Abit spend millions of $$ on these things, and for similar reliability, you should demand the same standards every step of the way for your home-rolled machines. Make sure your computer store hasn't "helped" you by opening the static baggies. Write that one into the contract with the computer store. And make sure that the hard disk drives are still in their packing "egg-crate" things. You really don't want a box with a stack of hard disk drives. (Western Digital had a great video on hard drive handling floating around the 'Net, you should view it if you're building en masse.)
I saw both Toy Story 2 and Monsters, Inc. on the DLP at the Cinemark Legacy in Plano. Three things really blew me away. First, it's bright! When the green "the following preview has been approved..." slate goes up, the sheer amount of light coming back off that screen is just amazing.
I used to work for a video company. We rented out Hughes/JVC ILA video projectors, $250,000 each, circa 1993. Nothing compared to the ones at the Famous Players down the road from my house, but we'd light cigarettes off the lenses of these things. I loved those Hughes. 1024x768 at 72Hz refresh and x-deflection up to 55kHz in 1993. Man, did I ever love those things.
The next thing that surprised me is the noise: there isn't any. You don't notice the sound of the projector (that "tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh" sound of the gate opening and closing) until it's gone. When the house lights go down before the movie starts, it's completely silent in the theater, which is pretty cool.Not just the audio noise of the film being snapped through the gate and the shutter exposing the screen, but also the video noise - dust, cigarette burns in the film, color differences when the alternate projector spins up and the system switches to another reel. Just a perfect image, silent, solid, stable and bright.
My first ever digital movie experience was The Mummy. I was with friends and we were in a trippy sort of mood. One of them was a roadie, and sure enough, out came the acid. Three hits of good old 1960s blotter, sat down in the movie theater, and I was convinced that my brain was going to melt. The carpet was attacking me. And then I experienced a digital movie projector for my first time. That was powerful enough, but imagine the effects of a digital projector, acid and The Mummy all at once. (Those who don't know what I'm talking about are encouraged to see the movie "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas", then view "The Mummy" in that mindset.)
Every scene from that movie is burned into my brain. And I think I'm probably the only person I know who actually enjoyed The Mummy.
This is what I remember from Physics 101. However, I may be wrong, seeing as you are the one claiming to be the "physics geek". In any case, however, your definition is contrary to standard, correct English usage.
Actually, he's right, and you're right. The centripetal force is the force acting towards the center, which has to counteract the object's tendency to continue forward in a straight line at a given speed. The centrifugal force, of course, is the apparent push outward from the center. In actual fact, the object wishes to go 90 degrees to the radius of its circle.
The only problem I counld think of for such a device is that I don't think normal optical media will work as expected if you read it at a low angle.
The reflected beam will bounce off at 90 degrees to the incident beam; it will not return to your spinning mirror for neat and efficient collection.
The pits pressed onto a CD are exactly 1/4 of the wavelength of the IR light which reads them. The light is generated by a laser. The requirement for a laser is based on the fact that laser light occupies a very narrow spectrum, tighter than an LED, and certainly more so than any conventional light source with a filter.
Now, if you think about what happens to the light which falls into a 1/4 wavelength deep pit and gets reflected back out, you'll see why both wavelength and incident angles are extremely critical to the proper operating of an optical drive.
Hint for the clueless: think of degrees of a sinewave; 1/4 wavelength = 90 degrees. 2*(1/4) = 1/2 wavelength = 180 degrees. Draw two sinewaves of equal magnitude at 180 degrees to each other. For each value of x, add y1 and y2. Whaddaya get?
All the same, that was a hell of a nice effort for a 12-year-old. At the time, I wasn't inventing, I was just tearing apart old color TV sets I'd find in the garbage. Times tables suck, I agree. Calculus is fun, though, since the whole thing (first principles of differentiation) is a really cool dodge around the silly problem of not being able to divide by zero.
By the way, the lands are not binary ones and the pits are not binary zeros, as you might think intuitively. The *transition* from a pit to a land or from a land to a pit represents one value; the lack of a transition represents the other.
Show them scripting, show them administrative task automation, show them remote consoles and X, out of the box, no additional software, show them the C API, clean, documented, show them the daemons. If they dig it, good.
KDE kicks butt, but Microsoft still has the best desktop overall. Unfortunately.
You have to look at this from their perspective. They've been suckered in by the party line enough to go for a .NET certification. They know Windows desktops and filesystems, the myriad software available, the little glitches that plague in Windows and the pitfalls to avoid.
They believe that Windows can do everything that Linux/UNIX can. And for the most part, they're right. Sorry, but Windows even does some of it better - GUI, installation.
Before you show them any of the Linux/UNIX tools and freak them out because kmail doesn't have a convenient pop-up autocomplete address bar, or Mozilla doesn't render Yahoo quite right at 1024x768, or that there's no concept of default file extensions ("what do you mean I have to choose a player for an fscking .wav file?"), show them the one thing they're gonna be most interested in, if they're serious about using the .NET training they're taking.
$ uptime
3:31pm up 101 days, 9:03, 5 users, load average: 1.37, 1.11, 1.04
Uptime is so much more than a number. It's a sales tool. And we're trying to sell the world on alternatives to Windows.
Remember, to a Windows user, long uptime is...
It's worth pointing out to these people that all the longest-running servers on Netcraft's web server survey are *not* running Windows. Not one of them. Microsoft fans will argue that IIS wasn't out when some of the machines in Netcraft's top uptime list were last rebooted. Not true: IIS came out with NT 4.0 if not before, and that was 1996, far more than ~1250 days of uptime the longest-running Netcraft record-holders have been up.
Even so, thinking back on it, reminding these people that Windows 2000 was still on the horizon and pets.com was still attracting investors when these machines were last rebooted, ought to be a selling feature.
My server is a selling feature, too. www.glowingplate.com is currently running on a Pentium 90. It's been up and running for 101 days, generates a lot of pages dynamically for about 5,000 Google visitors a day, usually keeps a CPU load of 1-3, and was last down because of a power failure.
Not a world record uptime or performance load. Hell, it's still even running the distro's stock kernel. But I've never seen anything like it with IIS.
We are like the people on the street with uncut grass and old broken down crap strewn all around our yard. Nobody wants to come over and say hello because they assume the residents are low lifes. If we do get a visit, it may be the head of the galaxy association telling us to take down the tacky mood decorations and clean the junk out of our space.
Or not. Judging from my experience when I leave old junked cars and major appliances in my front yard, it's a great way to make new friends and the encounter would go more like this:
Interstellar pickup truck with interstellar Confederate flag comes up to the edge of our debris field. Occupant gets out, picks his way gingerly down to the surface, knocks on International Space Agency's door.
"Hi there. I wuz just drivin' by, and I was wundrin, is y'all still usin' that there Iridium system you'se've got still orbitin' yer planet? I got sompin' like it at home and I need some parts. Kin I take it off'n yer hands fer a coupla cases of beer? Thank-ye kindly."
I just have to know: have any administrators that you know of actually done "format c:
Well, I received a very angry e-mail from someone screaming at me that they "destroyed their computer" by following the instructions on my website.
My reply was that they were welcomed to follow my advice, but since the Internet is a fertile ground of alternative viewpoints, even the remotest inkling of intelligence might suggest that one may seek a second opinion prior to typing the fateful instructions.
Of course, depending on the version of Windows involved, different things will happen. I deliberately tried it on an old Windows 95 installation I had kicking around, and the machine didn't crash but it wouldn't reboot, either. So the number of people who may have followed these instructions is difficult to ascertain by feedback; I would suspect that most of these imbeciles would have a hard time finding the site to contact me afterwards.
I do get 3,000+ Google-inspired hits a day. If 1% of them follows the instructions, then 30 people will have newly-cleaned hard disk drives every day.
I guess it's a good thing for them that they didn't accidentally stumble onto some of the more questionable medical sites on the 'Net.
Dude - it was a Delorean because it has those cool gull wing doors
DeLorean door for sale, FOB Toronto/Ottawa, Canada. Best offer.
Comes with door wiring harness. No glass, no prop cylinders, no inner door skins, no mirror, no lock or latch.
Sheetmetal is perfect, with the exception of a slight dent near the lock cylinder hole; it looks like someone attempted to break into the car, and a mark which looks like it might have been inflicted by a shopping cart.
Came off a 1983 DeLorean being restored to show-car quality, but this door is perfectly well suited to a driver DeLorean with accident damage, or for hanging on the wall. Will fit any DMC-12 coupe from 1981-1983.
Very large and awkwardly-shaped. Shipping will be expensive.
Offers? E-mail me.
I don't know why there's so much hate towards ricecars.
Because they think their cars are fast, they all drive like they think they're in The Fast and The Furious, and yet there's no science in their construction of a "fast" car.
If the rice crowd things ugly-ass aluminum wings and neons are cool then let them go ahead and do it, no harm.It becomes my problem when I'm sharing the road with people who put clear taillights on their cars. Clear tail light lenses don't usually have cat-eye reflectors, making parked ricer cars a danger on night streets. The clear lenses are usually colored red by GE 1157 light bulbs dipped in red paint. The resulting pinkish brake lights are not an SAE-approved color and are therefore a safety hazard. The idiots who cover over parts of their taillights to reduce the surface area and give it a "custom" look are equally stupid. Deliberately reducing the effectiveness of your brake light system is grounds for being nominated for a Darwin Award after an 18-wheeler demolishes you in the fog.
Playing with your suspension geometry by hacking coil springs is a good one. There's nothing like watching some guy driving down the road with hideously expensive low-profile tires on his 1990 Honda Accord, with the suspension so badly butchered that his $300 apiece tires are being lunched by his bad camber. Of course, bad camber = bad contact with the road, not a good safety feature for any car let alone a "performance" car.
And probably most stupid is the let's-hack-off-a-windshield-wiper-to-look-Euro. Uh-huh. It's a good idea to reduce your visibility in inclement weather because you think it will go faster or look better.
On the other hand, I can't understand why anyone is willing to buy a car that only gets 15 miles to the gallon and then modify it so it only gets 8.Because there's no replacement for displacement. The biggest killer for gas mileage on my truck is not the 400 CID motor, but the tall rear-axle gears. They're great for acceleration, they're great for when I'm towing a trailer, but they're bad on the highway because, without an overdrive (most vehicles of that age didn't have overdrive top gears), my engine is spinning 4000 RPM at 55MPH. A 6.6L (400CID) engine spinning at 4000 RPM will consume a lot of fuel.
Interestingly, that engine could easily propel the truck at 55MPH with an engine speed of about 2000RPM, by my calculations, the motor has sufficient torque at that RPM, and it would get more than twice the gas mileage. I'd have to find a Mopar automatic transmission with an overdrive and a big-block bell-housing pattern (not easy to find) or I could convert it to stickshift, which is my plan. I already have an old A-833 4-speed OD transmission for it, now all I need is a big-block bell housing. ($$$)
Of course, I could just drop the rear-end gear ratio from the current 4.11 to about 2.25s, but I really like the acceleration, and I need the raw power when I've got 5,000lbs of trailer on my truck's tongue and I want onto a freeway.
I spend ~$300/mo in fuel, and I drive something that I really like. The alternative would be to spend ~$300/mo to buy a brand new tinfoil shitbox that I really don't like.
Umm..actually, my little jap race car is far from cramped, on the contrary, it's quite roomy for a 2x2. I'd be willing to be that it has more room than a 3-series coupe.
Possibly, but I'm 6'4". I stick with American cars, because they're the only ones into which I fit comfortably.
It also has real Recaro seats, which I may add, are very comfortable; and if you know anything about cars, then you know what Recaros are.No, actually, I've rebuilt engines. I rewired a 1957 Imperial Limousine which was used when the Queen visited Canada. And I helped a professional coachbuilder with the final body assembly of the restoration of a Cord (note, Cord, not Accord). I've heard the name "Recaro" bandied about by those who think they know a lot about cars but don't know a crowfoot wrench from a distributor wrench. I think I know something about cars, yet I don't know why the name Recaro is so important to ricers.
I do know what Simpson seats are, are these similar?
Please, thrall me with your acumen.
In fact, my ex-boss owns an M3 that falls apart far more than my "jap" car. To BMW, you buy a $60k car, and they give you an $8 POS wrench (to fix the crappy car you just bought) that you'll break within the first week.A "POS" wrench? Explain. For despite knowing how to use an English wheel, I'm unclear as to what a POS wrench would be.
Not to mention, my car would beat said german car in any race, straight line or not, thanks to its 2300lb. curb weight,During acceleration, inertia effectively throws the weight of the car back, resulting in less pressure pushing the front wheels into contact with the road. Your little FWD econobox therefore will have a harder time getting traction under acceleration. There's a reason why virtually all classes of professional racing, from NHRA to NASCAR to F1 to Ralleye, do not use front wheel drive cars.
But I'm sure you already knew that, for you are smarter than I because you know what Recaro seats are.
Lotus tuned suspension (Yes, thats Lotus, as in Lotus Elise),"My Celeron will beat your Cray!"
"Why?"
"Because I tuned it."
[sigh]
Dude. Does your car have MacPherson struts on the front suspension? Yes? If so, then the very design of your car introduces a handling error that you cannot work around.
MacPherson struts are popular because they're cheap and light.
Performance vehicles almost universally use a double-A-arm and coil spring or double-A-arm and torsion bar system, because the pivot during steering can be dead center in the wheel if you have the right rim offset.
With a MacPherson strut, it's at the top plates. Measure the distance from your struts' top plates to the centerline of each front wheel. The distance from that pivot point to the centerline of the wheel can be seen as the pivot offset, and would be the longest (non-hypotenuse) side of a right-angled triangle. Turn the steering wheel to the end of its travel, measure the angle of rotation about the pivot point, and use sin (theta) = (opposite) / (hypotenuse) to solve for (opposite). That number is how much your wheel moves forward or back within its wheel well as you steer. Less is, obviously, better.
But I'm sure you already knew that, because you also know that little green Lotus stickers on your fenders make your car go faster, right?
and AWD. Oh, did I forget to mention the highly turbocharged inline-4? Ooops."All Wheel Drive" = transverse mount front-wheel-drive with a chain driving a slipping clutch differential on the rear wheels. Or some similar variant, where the car is primarily front wheel drive and the rear wheels have only differential power applied.
Test for that? Jack up the front of the car. Place it on jack stands. Start the car, put your foot on the brakes and then put it into drive. (If you know how to drive a stickshift, you'd put it into 1st gear and let out the clutch at the friction point.) Okay. Your speedometer is moving, but you aren't: your front wheels are spinning, and the rear wheels are stationary. That's All-Wheel-Drive. Differential effect won't couple power to the rear wheels when the front wheels are slipping. So what's the point?
Slight advantage during cornering, with all four wheels on the ground, but mostly the marketing makes hausfrau think that they won't get stuck in snow.
Wow. "Highly turbocharged". What's your wastegate set to? How convinced are you that his BMW is "falling apart" whilst your "highly turbocharged" motor is gonna last?
Take a Celeron 500. Overclock it to 1GHz. Compare it to a Pentium III @800MHz. Wow. You're faster. But how long will it last before thermal cycling cracks the silicon die?
Oh wait...my car's 13 years old...Ah. "Lotus Tuned" and 13 years old. Wow. You've got an Isuzu. You're so cool. People in Kias must look down on you, but you're the envy of every Excel owner.
Oh yeah, and those Isuzus *do* have MacPherson struts. I've changed them. No, you could *not* outhandle a Beamer. In fact, you couldn't outhandle a 1971 Chevrolet Impala with a loose tie-rod end and a broken sway-bar, but I'm sure you already knew that.
no you're right, german cars do last longer. Now, let me go find a VW Corrado G60 that hasnt had $3000 worth of supercharger problems....Lemme find an Isuzu that's still worth $300 by the time it's 10 years old.
Have you checked where your A-pillars meet the firewall? The Isuzu Impulse and the Stylus both seem to generate tiny little stress fractures there because there's too much body flex. You might want to pull out your MIG welder and box that area a little.
Oh... Mommy won't let you have a MIG welder? Wow, that's a bummer. And yet you're inspiring because you've overcome that sufficiently to be such an authority on cars.
Wow. I bet the chicks just dig your 17-year-old pimply ass in your 13-year-old Isuzu. Does it help you get laid? Can I be your friend?
I don't have the link, but I saw a video on Consumption Junction of a Viper getting owned by a shitty little Civic.
It's unlikely, but not impossible.
Acceleration is all about power to weight ratio, and then how well you get that power to the ground.
First off, economics. I can go to a wrecking yard, spend $50 for a used Chevy 350 from a junked taxicab, spend $1000 having it machined and then another $2000 on assorted parts, assemble it myself, and get (conservatively) 400HP from it.
To get anywhere near that kind of power from a smaller engine (1.6L = ~95 CID), the engine must be revved up all to hell, and the machining tolerances must therefore be extremely tight - spending lots of labor having pistons balanced to within 1/100th of a gram, versus 1/10th of a gram like you could do with the 350. Yes, the newer engine's head will flow better than a 350, yes, there's less reciprocating mass because it's just a sewing machine. But to get the volumetric efficiency and torque curves high enough to do that without grenading, you're adding a turbo, porting the heads, etc. Aftermarket parts are far more expensive for those motors, and the knowledge base of guys who've built up Civics for serious power is a lot less than the skill and number of guys who've built up 350s. Expect to spend $10-15k by the time all is said and done.
Now, gearing. A Viper's first and second gear are agressive, but the car is designed for top-end speed, which is reflected in the design of the brakes and suspension. The Viper will be quick off the line (1st and 2nd) but the motor will have more room to wind in 3-6, to allow the RPMs to be reasonable at 100+MPH.
If the Civic is anywhere near as quick as the Viper off the line, he's obviously not only built up the engine but also the drivetrain (which would break if too much power was applied to it). While building a tough engine, therefore, the guy in the Civic would have had to build a transmission to survive the forces the engine is passing through it. At the same time, he would have changed the gear ratios for acceleration.
A big strong guy on a bicycle stuck in tenth gear won't out-accelerate a puny guy shifting his derailleur from 1 through 5.
Having said that, even geared for speed rather than acceleration, a Viper still turns low 13s. That's about 13.2 seconds from stopped to the end of a quarter mile. It's quicker than most production cars, but certainly not fast when you're talking about building for performance. My (stock) 1976 Ram with the 400 (6.6L) engine does it in about 14.8.
By comparison, I built a Chevette with a Buick 3.8L V6 under the hood. It turned 12.8 seconds on the 1/4 mile - slightly faster than a Viper. But, there's no way it could attain let alone maintain 150MPH the way a Viper could. Buy a Mustang 5.0, slap headers, cam, 4-bbl intake and carb at it, and you're faster off the line than a Viper.
We still haven't even gotten into a question of driving skill. Lots of people who own Vipers know nothing about cars. They're dot-com CEOs and accountants who don't know anything about cars. Is he sidestepping the clutch to hold the engine at its peak torque curve? If he's not, he's not making full use of the power.
A V12 getting owned by whatever is in those Rice Burners..I'm not sure if it's possible for an inanimate object to possess another inanimate object.
Last Viper I drove had a V10, actually, rather similar to this one which you can order at the parts counter at any Chrylser dealership. And, while I imagine you understand the concept of cylinders, I will assume that you don't understand the concept of displacement. Here's the relationship in a nutshell: All other things being equal, a Ford 300 inline 6-cylinder would probably outperform a Ford 302 V8. Why? The 6-cylinder motor has two less pistons dragging up and down, two less pairs of valves, two less connecting rod bearings - but still pumps through almost (2 cubic inches difference) as much air as the V8.
Cylinders are not everything. You don't get your power from having more cylinders, you get it from having more displacement. Cylinders merely divide the displacement into manageable chunks.
By the way, you'll note that the Viper's motor is 488 cubic inches. About 8.0L.
Even if the dude in the Viper could not drive worth a shit, as the car approached 100 I am sure the V12 would have quite a bit of influence... If you were correct, then the Viper would have won.Yup. Though it does take nearly a quarter of a mile for a Viper to get up to 100MPH from a stop. Most street races are significantly less than that.
Even so, either the guy in the Honda spent more doing that than it would have cost him to buy a Viper, or the guy in the Viper was the typical Viper-driver.
Ask yourself this. The Viper has a large displacement engine (488CID) and is rear-wheel-drive. The Honda has a small displacement engine (~95CID, too lazy to calculate it right now) and is front-wheel-drive.
Virtually all performance cars have a large displacement and are rear-wheel-drive - From Aston-Martin to Vector to Viper, with Porsche, Ferrari, Llamborghini, 1960s-1970s American musclecars, NASCAR, NHRA, serious ralleye, etc. in there.
Virtually all economy cars have a small displacement and are front-wheel-drive. The Honda is in the same high class as Tercels, Ford Escorts, Renault 5, VW Rabbit, Dodge Aries/Plymouth Reliant, Nissan Micra, etc.
Ask yourself why.
Now, go play with your automotive Celeron.
How much do you pay for your fuel?
Currently, about $0.75/L. Yes, the truck is hugely expensive. But, I figured, I could either spend $300/mo on fuel and drive something I like, or I could spend $300/mo on a new car that I don't really like.